I think we have similar thinking - any business I run needs to operate around my life, not the other way around. Wrote a blog post about it here: ben-makes-stuff.beehiiv.com/p…
Not sure how your question about sacrificing time upfront for a reward later relates to the rest of your post, but that's also the approach I've chosen and how I got into indie hacking in the first place (worked big tech jobs for a while, saved money and got passive income, then started indie hacking -- delayed gratification)
Good question - inherently, delayed gratification implies some level of dissatisfaction while going through that process. I'm also bad at compartmentalizing things, so when my job wasn't ideal that led to other parts of my life not going so well. So, I always felt somewhat dissatisfied with my life when working in Corporate America. Not to the degree where I felt my entire life was shit (and I did like parts of my job), but that feeling was always there.
It was however a conscious decision to "embrace the suck" as they say in the military and remain at that job for a while and stack money so that I could lead a different life eventually.
I'm with you on not being able to compartmentalise well.
Part of the human condition is always to be slightly dissatisfied with things, so that never truly goes away. Compromise is another word that often comes up here - you can almost never have everything going well at once; sometimes some life aspects just have to fall aside for a time.
True, even with indie hacking there are aspects I'm dissatisfied with (lack of social interaction during the day being a big one - attempting to fix that by moving to a digital nomad hub where I can surround myself with people building bootstrapped startups). There are always negatives with each decision, just trying to optimize for a better ratio of good stuff to negative stuff
I think we have similar thinking - any business I run needs to operate around my life, not the other way around. Wrote a blog post about it here: ben-makes-stuff.beehiiv.com/p…
Not sure how your question about sacrificing time upfront for a reward later relates to the rest of your post, but that's also the approach I've chosen and how I got into indie hacking in the first place (worked big tech jobs for a while, saved money and got passive income, then started indie hacking -- delayed gratification)
Thanks for sharing!
I guess that's part of my question overall - what's the line between delayed gratification and flat out living an unsatisfying life?
I think it'll be different for everyone, but it takes very deliberate introspection to find it.
Good question - inherently, delayed gratification implies some level of dissatisfaction while going through that process. I'm also bad at compartmentalizing things, so when my job wasn't ideal that led to other parts of my life not going so well. So, I always felt somewhat dissatisfied with my life when working in Corporate America. Not to the degree where I felt my entire life was shit (and I did like parts of my job), but that feeling was always there.
It was however a conscious decision to "embrace the suck" as they say in the military and remain at that job for a while and stack money so that I could lead a different life eventually.
I'm with you on not being able to compartmentalise well.
Part of the human condition is always to be slightly dissatisfied with things, so that never truly goes away. Compromise is another word that often comes up here - you can almost never have everything going well at once; sometimes some life aspects just have to fall aside for a time.
True, even with indie hacking there are aspects I'm dissatisfied with (lack of social interaction during the day being a big one - attempting to fix that by moving to a digital nomad hub where I can surround myself with people building bootstrapped startups). There are always negatives with each decision, just trying to optimize for a better ratio of good stuff to negative stuff